ROS 2 Rust Meeting: October

[jhdcs]

The next ROS 2 Rust Meeting will be 2024-10-14T13:00:00Z

The meeting room is tentatively at https://meet.google.com/xrf-pzbg-mtj , however, we’ve had technical difficulties getting rooms up and running. If the room needs to change, we will update this thread with the new info!

[maspe36]

Here are my notes from the meeting today

Attendees

• Sam
• Esteve
• Grey M
• Nathan Wiebe Neufeldt
• Julia

ros2_rust as a supported client library

Some significant progress has been made over these last few months.

Minimum

• Moving rosidl_generator_rs and rosidl_runtime_rs upstream
  • Esteve says talk to Scott (and Steven!)
  • Esteve mentions it could be useful to split these two packages into their own repo
    • This would mirror the split between rclcpp and rosidl
  • Grey says we may need to add these repos to some .repo manifest which prevents us from going straight to the build farm
• colcon test support
  • Add colcon test verb by luca-della-vedova · Pull Request #19 · colcon/colcon-ros-cargo · GitHub
• Feature complete for message generation*
  • Actions – Action message support by nwn · Pull Request #417 · ros2-rust/ros2_rust · GitHub
• Upstream colcon extensions
  • Publish to PyPI via Trusted Publishers · Issue #42 · colcon/colcon-cargo · GitHub
  • Also a partial blocker for Jazzy support

Nice to have

• Resolve quadratic build times (background)
  • Sam thinks this will show up once a user has a sufficiently complex project using ros2_rust
  • Grey proposed maybe using a Cargo workspace for generated code?
    • Flip potential solution #3 here Investigate proposed alternatives to the existing message generation pipeline. · Issue #402 · ros2-rust/ros2_rust · GitHub
  • Esteve mentioned we could use some kind of tool to share caches between cargo workspaces
    • sccache
  • Sam is tracking work on the issue here
• Constant message generation
  • Don’t think this is a blocking feature to official client library status

Async Executor

Async Execution

Grey working on this. Talked about presenting slides at the next WG meeting on this. Said this impl roughly follows the slides he presented a few working groups ago

Notes

• Cargo registry concept, point to “jazzy” and then versions get pulled by distros
• We should adopt a code of conduct
• Julia is going to take a look at generating constants

[esteve]

An update regarding our colcon extensions. We can now distribute the cargo-ament-build plugin via PyPI thanks to Maturin. The idea sounds crazy, but for example, Ruff is a Python linter written in Rust and distributed as a Python wheel.

This allows us to depend on it via the colcon-ros-cargo extension to streamline the installation and to build Debian packages without worrying about cargo and Debian

[esteve]

@maspe36

Moving rosidl_generator_rs and rosidl_runtime_rs upstream

Just a clarification about this, we don’t need to move the repositories upstream, but submit them to the ROS buildfarm so that they can be installed via API.

For now, we’ll submit rosidl_generator_rs only as it’s just a regular CMake / Python / ROS package that has no Rust code in it.